


these old back roads where no one lives (and no one goes)

by wherethewhiled



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Mild Sexual Content, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wherethewhiled/pseuds/wherethewhiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regina's isolated once again.  And so she smokes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these old back roads where no one lives (and no one goes)

_I guess that autumn_   
_Gets you remembering_   
_And the smallest things_   
_Just make you cry._

Hawksley Workman 

 

The teaspoon scrapes the bottom of the bag and she can do exactly nothing except heave a long sigh — not enough for a proper cup. (She won’t be able to avoid buying groceries for much longer.) Regina opens a cabinet all the same, pulling out the French press, and dumps whatever dark granules are left inside. She tosses the bag with a sharp jut of her lips.

The stove clicks on, fire tickling the bottom of the kettle, and the metal groans as heat seeps up the sides. Thoughtlessly, she stares at the backsplash until it whistles. Pouring the water in, hot and steaming up her forearm, she waits against the counter again for another five minutes.

Kitchen cleared, and mug finally in hand, Regina strides upstairs to her bedroom. Pressing a palm into the mattress, she rummages in a bottom drawer, fingers blindly feeling through some papers, and other junk, until hitting on the small, rectangular pack at the very back.

Crisp, late autumn air surges in as she pops a window open.

Sitting down, she prepares herself for a weak coffee and a cigarette.

Her door is wide open; there’s no one left in the house to hide anything from anymore. But at least she’s dressed and her hair is blown out, even if she has no makeup on.

The cigarette smoke rolls off the window sill like a thick fog coming off the shore.

She is getting too old for this, wallowing in self-pity, too weary to keep living, lonely like this. Her bones creak along with the soft crackling of the cigarette as she sucks on it’s papery end. Too bad surviving is all she’s ever known, and dying just seems like a joke now.

The satisfying crunch of the cigarette snuffing out against the ash in the porcelain tray provides her a few fleeting seconds of comfort, before her brain shuts down again.

—

She’s not a smoker — that half-pack in the back of her drawer is god knows how many years old.

Over those first eighteen years on her own, a solitary light in a slumbering coastal town, tucked away in some forgotten corner of Maine, USA, she would have a couple whenever the weather got damp and chilly. The way it burns itself out, stinging up her nose, feeling up the inside of her lungs, before expelling in ghostly puffs into the outside air let her know she existed, was still a part of the exchange of molecules that have known her and were floating out to touch whatever else was out there beyond the thick forests concealing her fresh start.

Upon finalizing the adoption papers, she had a couple (stressed and terrified of messing up), and she had a couple after dropping off Henry at his first therapy session (knowing she was messing up), but haven’t touched them since.

Staring out the window in her kitchen, she lights another cigarette.

It’s something to occupy her hands.

—

She rolls on her back and slips off her pyjama bottoms, tosses them from under the warm covers. Her fingers run down her folds, and she squeezes her eyes tight and huffs out her frustration over how wet she’s gotten herself, wishing she wasn’t so alone in her bed right now.

Pressing a cheek to her pillow, she holds the backs of her other fingers against her mouth as she works herself up to a hazy hum with firm circles, and her knees come up, and she whimpers feebly in her throat. Her lower back separates from the mattress. Her skin gets hypersensitive with the sheets and the pockets of air around her body and soon an orgasm blooms up and out of her, cursory and embarrassing and unsatisfying.

She blinks, and breathes, and her heart beats, and her body goes on functioning without her telling it to.

Her legs stretch out and as she gazes up into the black, her eyes begin to well. For several minutes then she cries (quietly, out of habit). Because it’s horrifying, how empty her arms feel, and she bunches the cotton sheets in her sticky hand to keep the whole of herself from flying apart in a burst of stitches, bits and portions spiralling weightlessly away from each other.

Eventually, pushing back soaked strands of hair around an ear, Regina gets out of bed, pulls on her pyjama bottoms, and pads out of her bedroom with that small rectangular pack in hand.

—

“Uh, your front door is unlocked.”

Regina exhales, her thoughts coiling up and thinning out into the embrace of a cloudy indigo night. “But of course, you thought the right thing to do was to simply walk on in.”

“I knocked.”

She must’ve forgotten to bolt the door when she came home yesterday after sitting in her car all night across from Emma’s third-story apartment, spying on the windows, following the indistinct forms moving back and forth like a kind of puppet show. She tips a shoulder back to look on Emma with an even expression.

Emma pushes the sliding door to the backyard further open, and leans her shoulder on it’s edge as she crosses her arms.

“How is Henry?”

“He’s sleeping.”

Regina squashes the urge to put her Marlboro out on Emma’s own straight face (she’s nearly gone through the entire pack already, and she doesn’t believe in squandering something she wants). Surveying her big, neglected backyard once more, she skims the tip of her fourth finger over her lips, cigarette held in her first two waving in her periphery, and considers her most private anxieties now unfolding like paper notes between her lungs. Regina takes a long pull.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t,” she retorts, blowing out and jamming the cigarette in her empty crystal glass, regretting it immediately, before pulling the front of her coat closed, and wrapping herself up in her own arms. “What do you want?”

“I wanted to see you.”

Letting out a scoff, Regina brushes by Emma and stalks back into the unlit kitchen, depositing her glass in the sink. Emma calls after her with a resigned breath out and catches up to her by the stove, hauling her close and backing her against the knobs. Regina throws her a dirty look from beneath her lashes then turns her head to stare at the jars in the corner under the cupboards. “I am not some plaything you get to take out only when it suits you,” she grumbles.

Emma sighs (and Regina can feel the shaky breath that follows right against her own diaphragm). “Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry,” she says, surprisingly soft and sincere, and her hands come up to surround Regina’s jaw. “Regina, I’m sorry.” Emma tries to encourage her to meet eye-to-eye with a bit of pressure from those fingers.

Frowning, she relents with an indignant tilt of her chin. There are millions of things for them to talk through but Emma simply leans in and the proximity is too much, too much to keep holding out on touching her, and they kiss — a bit of tongue, and slow between every press in.

When they part, Regina nearly forgets to open her eyes it feels so good to just kiss again.

“Were you in bed? It’s only like 9:30.” Emma quirks her eyebrows and in a split-second the moment is gone, and Regina blinks through her sudden embarrassment over her mismatched coat and pyjamas, her unmade appearance, and bare feet. “Hey, hey,” Emma says frantically, redirecting her face again, “I’m just gonna shut up now, okay?”

“I hate you,” she whispers, before they’re kissing and kissing and full on making-out and having feelings for each other again.

Of course, Emma screws it up mumbling, “I was gonna come over earlier … I was.”

Regina jerks back, their lips smacking noisily upon separating. “I can’t do this,” she says, and pushes away.

“No, no, wait — please.” Emma grabs a hold of her wrist, but doesn’t manhandle her this time.

Keeping her back to her, Regina spits out, “I don’t see you for over a week, and what — what is this?”

“It’s — it’s been complicated,” Emma splutters, “and I haven’t been able to talk with them, between these jurisdictional disputes and getting the town back on track and —”

“I don’t care,” Regina growls through her unsteady voice, “I haven’t seen you, or Henry, in over a week, Emma.”

“We’ve been trying to.” Firmly, she wraps her other hand around Regina’s forearm. “We miss you. We bought you groceries. See? On the counter.”

Regina honestly doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “I don’t need your pity or your charity.”

“Okay, but I do. I do.” It’s quiet, if not for the faint hum of the refrigerator, and Emma takes a hesitant step closer. (Regina tells herself to run, but she can’t because Emma isn’t letting go and she needs both her arms.) Nobody says anything for a long while “… can I have a smoke with you?”

—

They chain-smoke through the remainder of her cigarettes, sitting on a bench in the backyard with their feet in the grass. Emma has removed her boots and socks, and her toes wriggle through the blades.

“I’ve always liked Marlboros. I’d smoke whatever I could bum as a kid, you know. But Marlboros were the first brand I ever bought myself.”

Regina takes a big drag — for having yet another thing in common with Emma, for feeling the ache of making connections with somebody, for bonding over the insignificant details of a lonely life — and passes the cigarette.

The evening air is calm, although her heart is tossing and turning.

Her chin wobbles as she watches Emma bite her bottom lip for a moment before puffing out whatever it is she’s contemplating, taking the cigarette in her mouth once more. Regina actually wants so much to ask, but doesn’t.

“Oh, hey,” Emma says, and her eyes are twinkling (and Regina would rather look up at the forsaking stars) “there’s a pack of Oreos in there. Henry said you liked them?”

“He likes them,” she replies and sticks her right arm out across her body for the cigarette. A short pull and she shoves it back towards Emma, waving her two fingers impatiently. “He liked twisting them open and dipping them in his milk. He would make me dip them in my coffee.” Her hands are getting stiff from the cold, and she wrings them in her lap.

“You like them,” Emma prods, good-naturedly.

“Maybe a little.” But she can’t seem to pinpoint a memory on an exact timeline of when her little boy was still willing to have a cookie with her. Chancing a glance over, the unexpected smile she sees on Emma, only inches away, knocks the heart right out her — she misses their happiness so much. It spreads to the very corners just as she remembers, and she finally blurts, “I want my family back —” and lets up on the sob she’s been pressing on. “Oh — you promised me … that we would make it out of Neverland, and that the three of us, we would … you broke your promise.”

Quickly scooting over, Emma envelopes her in both arms, one hand supporting the back of her neck. “I haven’t, I haven’t,” she pleads.

—

They have sex, because it is still the one way they know how to truly mean anything to each other out loud.

The next morning, Regina wakes up stretching her arm out over the cold left side of her bed, as usual. Downstairs, in the kitchen however, she finds the groceries have been put away, the glass in the sink washed and drying on the rack, and a still hot French press filled with coffee sitting beside a mug and a plate with three Oreos stacked neatly on top of one another.

Regina calls out “Emma?” and waits, but she isn’t here.


End file.
